


Glass

by featherxquill



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Descent into Madness, F/M, Stalking, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:07:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24000328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/featherxquill/pseuds/featherxquill
Summary: Your wife's dead, Malfoy. The Dementors steal his memories of Narcissa's smile, and when they come back she is changed, with curled hair and scarlet nails and a green quill. If you're not crazy before you go to Azkaban, you come out that way.
Relationships: Lucius Malfoy/Narcissa Black Malfoy, Lucius Malfoy/Rita Skeeter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Glass

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Lucius FQF 2008. Beta'd by Katie.

The cells of Azkaban prison are darker than midnight, but they are not frightening at first, just dull. Lucius remembers the closing of the door and the knowledge that he will be in this place for ten years. He doesn’t know about fear – the last time he was here, the Dementors had started deserting their posts in favour of following the Dark Lord – but he can see how a man might be bored to death. He whiles away the first few days thinking about that Skeeter woman and the interview they allowed her just after the trial. She’d been all sympathy, at least on the surface: _your wife even helped in the Dark Lord’s downfall, and your family has endured so much this last year, it’s hardly fair. But I suppose the public must have someone to blame. How do you feel about that?_ He’d seen the predatory glint in her eyes, though, and knew how his words would be twisted when the article was published. He’d read her interviews after the trials of the first war, and she’d never done anything but tear Deatheaters apart. Easy targets, he supposed. After all, once they were in Azkaban, how could they possibly complain?

The Dementors glide past the doors and at first he barely notices them. A faint chill, that’s all, and if that’s what Rodolphus Lestrange was having nightmares about all the time, then he was a weaker man than Lucius had ever imagined. Pathetic. Lucius had knelt at the feet of the Dark Lord. He’d felt the lick of _Crucio_ as punishment for failure. Dementors were nothing in comparison to that.

But gradually it gets colder. Their chill seeps through the walls and he finds himself remembering things he doesn’t want to think of in this place – his wedding day, Narcissa bright and secret under her veil; the first time he held his son, that tiny hand curling around his finger – and they turn grey and slip through his fingers. He remembers that the weather was bad and the Skeeter woman was there at the reception, drinking champagne and taking notes on the guests. He remembers the rancid smell of nappies, incessant crying and vomit all over his night robe. 

The food tastes of potions. Lucius can barely remember what the sun looked like, or how it felt to stride down the street, but his muscles remain firm and his heart beats steadily in his chest. His eyes feel sharp in the darkness, and sometimes he thinks he can make out the forms in his cell – the narrow bunk against one wall and the hunching shapes of the lavatory and basin. Sometimes he even thinks he sees moonlight, but the cell has no window.

The Dementors do not take away a man’s lust. On one of the moon nights he thinks he can see his own hand wrapped around his cock, so he closes his eyes and thinks of Narcissa all spread out on their marital bed. There is a strange glint in her eyes that he knows shouldn’t be there, but he isn’t sure why, and in the end it doesn’t matter because the image is enough to bring him over the edge, spilling his seed all over filthy prison robes that won’t be changed until the end of the week. 

Human guards deliver the changes of clothes, and he is always glad to hear movements that don’t belong to Dementors. The hole in his door slides open and a new set of ragged robes fall through, and then the guard laughs and bashes his fist against the door.

“Malfoy, is it? Malfoy in this one?” The voice is nasal and jeering. “Did you hear, Malfoy? Your wife’s dead! Killed herself, I hear. Aurors found her naked in her bed, covered in her own filth. Supposed she thought it was romantic, swallowing poison. Quick, maybe. Probably took her days to die. Sweet dreams!” And the grate slid shut.

Dead. He is glad for the change of robes because he is sick all over the old ones, and when the Dementors glide past next they steal all the memories of Narcissa’s smile, and every time he thinks of her she is blue and cold.

The memories come back slowly, maybe over months, maybe years. He doesn’t know. She is changed, though; there is something different about her. She has curled hair and scarlet nails and she carries a green quill. She is dead, he knows it, but he has needs, and no other thoughts left, so he fists himself to her image and tries to forget that somewhere, the body he imagines is fetid and decaying.

When they release him, the sun should be blinding but it isn’t because of the potions. His muscles should be wasted, but they aren’t. The prison mediwizard gives him a clean bill of health, and then they let him out the doors. 

The world is loud. He’d forgotten about sound, about crowds, and suddenly everything seems huge and terrifying. People jostle him without seeming to notice him and he longs for the safety of the narrow bunk and the cell’s four walls, but he manages to remember his way around. The Gringott’s goblins give him the keys to his manor, sealed in an envelope marked with the stamp of the auror office.

The manor is empty and full of ghosts. The furniture is covered in white sheets, but there is no dust. Lucius supposes Draco had ordered the house elves to keep it clean, but he has no idea how to go about contacting his son. He has no owl and no food and there is no one to welcome him home or remind him how to live. He feels lost in the huge, empty rooms and there is a bleak quality to the sunlight that makes him think of death. He looks into the bathroom mirror and doesn’t recognise the face staring back at him.

Narcissa’s clothes are still in the closet. He traces his fingers over satin gowns and wishes he could remember what she looked like in them.

In Diagon Alley, he chooses an owl and pays to have it delivered to the manor. As he is leaving the store, a flash of red satin catches his eye and he turns in time to see a woman with curly blonde hair disappearing into Flourish and Blotts. He knows her. But isn’t she supposed to be dead?

He is still standing there minutes or maybe an hour later when she re-emerges from the store, a small bag in her hand, only perhaps he has moved into the shade of another building so she won’t see him. She walks with confidence, heels clicking on the stones, and she passes him by without a glance. He’s not sure he knows how to stalk, how to follow, but he was once a Deatheater and his body remembers the movements. He passes quietly through the streets behind her, slipping into the shadows again when she arrives at a small townhouse a few streets from Diagon and lets herself in without looking back. 

He hardly has to turn to apparate because his head is spinning already. Back at the manor, the afternoon shadows are creeping across the floor and the spaces are too big for his head. He locks himself in the study and hides under his desk.

That woman, she’s supposed to be dead. He remembers her face from his mind in Azkaban, remembers knowing she was dead even as his seed spilled over his hand and he felt even dirtier than before. _Your wife is dead, Malfoy,_ but had that really happened? Had someone really told him that or had the Dementors twisted his fantasies into that?

 _Narcissa. Narcissa._ He goes back to the house and watches her from the shadow across the road as she comes and goes, this time in blue, the next in purple. He doesn’t wash his hair because he knows people will recognise it, and he buys cheap clothes at a store on the loud side of the Leaky Cauldron with strange money that a man at the pub offered to change for him before he went through. Then he follows her again to a big building on the other side of the Ministry and watches the windows all day, sometimes catching glimpses of her through them. 

Not dead. Not...

Maybe she doesn’t know they let him out. Maybe she left the manor and no one told her. The voice in his memory was a Dementor dream and she didn’t know he’d been let out. If she did, she would surely come home. He could tell her himself, but something is holding him back. Memory, maybe, and the way it sits strangely in his mind. He remembers her in a wedding dress, remembers spreading her out on the bed, but her face is strange, like he’s looking at her through glass etched with one picture and there’s another underneath that he can’t see clearly.

Glass. Memories. He wants to know if she still exists the way she does in his memories.

The next day, he doesn’t follow her home. He is already there when she arrives, having let himself into the house’s tiny backyard – she’d be better off back at the manor, more space – and he watches as she moves through the house, fixes herself a drink (a martini? She never liked gin) and kicks her shoes off before she pads up the stairs. He loses sight of her, and for a moment his heart pounds in his head, but then he spots the tree in the yard and he uses his wand to help him climb it. 

She is shedding her clothes and his breath comes thick and hot, palms sweating against leaves, and he watches, _watches_ as she turns away from the window and satin slides down over back. Remembers their wedding night and the gleam in her eye and how understanding she was, how she murmured and listened and accepted. His cock is throbbing. He has to tell her. Knock on her door and tell her he’s out, he’s alive, he’s free and they can be together again, and she can come home.

Then she turns again, but it is not toward him, it is to the stairs, and there is a man on them with dark hair and darker motives. Lucius sees her smile at him, turn back to her mirror, continue to undress. The man is behind her, touching her shoulder, and then...

And then Lucius falls from the tree.

He is gone by the time they emerge, if they ever do, and then he is back at the manor probing fingers into bruises that go deeper than skin. 

Betrayed. He sees it now. They must have told her he’d been released – she’s his wife, for Merlin’s sake! – but she hadn’t listened. Hadn’t cared because she’d been with _him_ , whoever he was. Had the voice telling him she was dead been a Dementor dream after all, or had it been That Man playing tricks? Ten years he’d been gone, and she’d forgotten about him, moved on, had someone tell him she was dead. 

Bitch. _Whoring bitch_. He should have known never to trust her, those Blacks were all the same – liars and murderers and blood traitors. The man was probably a mudblood, and she’d wanted him to think she was dead so she could go off and fuck that filth.

Well, he’d show her he wouldn’t be so easily forgotten. He’d corner her, make her see him and force her to admit what she’d done. He was a Malfoy, and no one treated Malfoys like that.

He follows her for days, or maybe weeks, wearing the strange clothes and never washing his hair lest she recognise him, keeping to the shadows wherever he can. Some nights she goes to bed alone, others with the man, and on those nights he watches through the windows and doesn’t fall out of the tree this time, cock hard and weeping even though the rage burns him from the inside out. Slut. Stupid lying slut. He’ll make her pay.

She’s unpredictable, but he learns her movements. She likes to walk, and she doesn’t usually go far. A few times, she apparates and he loses her, but she always comes home quickly enough and he waits and watches and follows, waiting for the right moment. 

It comes one night when she doesn’t go home but instead to a bar where lanterns burn warm and she laughs behind the windows, sitting with a red-haired woman whose face he never sees. She leaves alone, and he hears the click of her heels on pavement before he sees her. 

And then he has her and her face is taut with surprise but she smells like something more primal – animal and fear – and he pulls her into the shadows he hasn’t really left for the last ten years. It takes her a few moments to recognise him, but when she does the smell of fear eases and she actually laughs at him.

“ _Lucius Malfoy?_ They finally let you out, did they? Azkaban hasn’t been kind to you, but I don’t expect it’s terribly kind to anyone. What on earth are you doing dragging me into alleyways like a Neanderthal?”

Her voice is different, changed like the rest of her, but there is still a familiarity in it, echoes of past words. It seems familiar for her to be asking questions, but he really can’t think of any specific ones she asked in the past.

He must stare for too long without talking, because she asks another question. “What do you want?”

Now that he has her, he doesn’t know what to say. Words die on his tongue, but the smell of animal fear lingers in his nostrils and turns him into a beast. He shoves her hard against the wall. The amused smile on her face has not disappeared, but it has frozen. She shifts in his grip but he presses harder, close enough that his prick, suddenly achingly hard, presses into her thigh. A light in her eyes matches the memories of his mind but not of his body, and from somewhere there is an image he thinks he’s seen before: her face like glass with another one beneath that he can’t quite make out.

“I see,” she says, and he hears the calculation in it, sees her mind ticking over. “It must be lonely in Azkaban. I suppose this will make a good story.”

And then her hand is in his pants wrapping relentlessly around his cock, and there are growls coming from him and the hasty movement of cloth, broken only by her _for the love of Merlin, don’t rip my bloody clothes_ and _here, like this_ and then he can see her, half shadowed by the darkness but the lines of suspenders over her white thighs are visible enough. And then he presses even closer, lifts and _sinks_ and there is heat around him and pressing against him like he hasn’t felt for so long, brick under his fingers and more animal, more sweat as he buries his face in her shoulder and grunts and thrusts, knowing even with his eyes squeezed shut that hers are open and she is watching him. He can feel it in her body and the way she moves against him, one leg about him, hips moving against his but the rest of her body tense and observing. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t _care_ because it has been so, so long, and she is his, and he will take her.

When he comes, it is oblivion, one final thrust that never ends and she is taking it all, taking all of him and the world is hot and spinning and heavy like the weight of ten years. His eyes are wet, his hands are shaking and he buries his face even further against her neck, breathing in her smell.

His breath, when it comes back, is rattling. He whispers to her skin: “ _Narcissa. Narcissa, come home._ ”

She pushes him away, and now he sees something hard in her eyes, and something fleeting, uncertain, concerned. “I’m not Narcissa,” she says. “I’m Rita.”

 _Rita_. And the panes of glass separate, and he sees the face that was hidden, and it is blonde like hers but softer and more angular. And it is dead. Dead and cold.

And he shatters.


End file.
